TRUST-SYSTEM 15

"The beginnings of this project date back to 1995; its aim was communication with the military-industrial complex and the collecting of documents connected with it. In 1995 I started to write letters to such corporations, very polite letters of the type "Marko Peljhan, Project Atol, Pact Systems Ljubljana, we are interested in what you are producing and selling, please send us information about it ..."

To my great surprise mail started showering in, rather in waves, as my address began to circulate ...In 1995 Slovenia was a hot territory, the embargo was being lifted and they were probably saying "well, well, here are our first buyers, we shall send them our offer." I collected a fat folder of such documents, many of them having a personal ring: "Dear Marko ..." etc., obviously meant to create an impression of trust, and since I am quite engaged in technology the result was that I changed my strategy of creation. At that time I wrote the text The Art of Intelligence on the Art of War Making, which became the basis of my work...

In that text I explained the principle of conversion, or how something made exclusively for military purposes can be used for civilian purposes. Within the Urbanaria project, if you remember it, we then developed the UCOG-144 project together with Borja Jelič and Luka Frelih as the programmers; Frelih was the first to use the GPS military satellite navigation system in the civilian sector in Slovenia. Over the past two years the use of the system spread so much that it became absurd to build it at home, as we had been doing, when it was available in shops for 300 US dollars ...

TRUST-SYSTEM 15 is designed as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), an unmanned flying object. Such objects are now being used in our near vicinity, and this is really a very interesting moment in time; one could call it the "electromagnetic" moment because all those mechanisms are receiving and transmitting signals, and if you have the right equipment and antennae you'll find that there are quite a lot of such things in the air today. We should probably devote more time to it now in Project Atol, but unfortunately time and capacities are in short supply. The project is about the developing of the UAV for civilian-tactical purposes, and I will now explain what these purposes are ...

The project was first presented as an exhibition of electronic components built into such mechanisms in April 1999 within the exhibition GENERATION Z at P.S. 1 in New York. The project has two objectives - tactical broadcasting of a radio programme over territory where broadcasting by the usual means is impossible because of military actions and civil repression, and collecting of intelligence for civilian purposes.

The second objective is of course in collision with all the legislations in the world, but I and an entire culture are certainly interested in how to maintain a degree of civilian control over very aggressive and self-reproducing systems of social repression which use these same methods to keep us under their thumb. You can see in the picture the installation of the project in New York. It was the first direct result of communication with the military-industrial complex; namely, the industry sent Project Atol its samples ...various materials started arriving at a specific address in New York, from UAV engines to electronics, jammers, telemetry and navigation systems.

The platform we intend to make will have satellite and inertial controls and navigation. We plan to make two versions for two kinds of applications - a swift one with a turbojet engine, and a slow one with a four-stroke aircraft engine. The components will include an FM transmitting and receiving system with memory for up to six hours of programming, and a jamming module with anti-electronic action feature - one was exhibited in New York and is manufactured by NOISECOMM Inc. which was very kind to us in this communication ...the same module is built into the EA6-B PROWLER aircraft (...)

In short, we are confronted with very complicated issues. The UAV will be designed for use in dangerous areas and for civilian tactical purposes ...What I mean is that, for example, you might incorporate "Radio Å tudent" in the platform and let it descend, say, on Serbia so that people can listen to the radio, until someone downs it, of course. The system was to be used first above Kosovo and Serbia - it appears sensible because of the circumstances there and the proximity. Apart from this, there is also in preparation a system of mobile tactical solar-energy-driven ground transmitters. My plan is by the end of next month to move three such transmitters to refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania ...

Question: You are referring to minimum strategies of resistance, but Makrolab or TRUST-SYSTEM 15, for example, do not seem to me to be minimal projects ...

Answer: I am speaking about the minimum because the projects grow out of the context of an artistic activity, and are really minimal in comparison with the systems with which they are in collision and with which they communicate. An effort by a few people is not tantamount to a very organised system that would stand behind the development of these projects with human and capital resources. The money invested in all these projects combined does not exceed 180,000 DEM, which is the price of a slightly above-average deluxe car today. It is an entirely different kind of activity which started four years ago, so it is still a small-scale activity. ML is indeed a big project and was the largest object on Documenta , but it was installed 25 km off Kassel and not many people saw it ...which again makes it minimal"

Source: Marko Peljhan: Strategies of Minimal Resistance - Analysis of Tactical Work in the Surveillance Society, talk at SCCA (Ljubljana Center for Contemporary Arts), 1999:
http://www.worldofart.org/english/99/99peljhantxang.htm
http://www.rezoweb.com/forum/technologie/aaaroskoforum/939.shtml

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